Philip Drake

(c. 1790 - c. 1857)

Some factual aspects of Philip Drake’s memoir, Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, have been questioned, but he claimed that for nearly fifty years he facilitated the transportation and importation of African slaves to, among other places, Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. The U.S. Constitution, in Article I, Section 9, stipulates that Congress could not outlaw the foreign slave trade before 1808. In that year the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect. It was not always rigorously enforced.